IN POLITICS there is no greater aphrodisiac than a motorcade, except perhaps a great big jet with UNITED STATES OF AMERICA emblazoned across its fuselage. Nothing makes this fact more cruelly apparent than when I see Al Gore toting his laptop off a commercial flight and trudging through the terminal in search of a luggage cart.
The 2004 presidential campaign began this Tuesday when the Senate and governor races ended. Which Democrat is going to have the testosterone to go up successfully against the bantam swagger of the Republican machine? The candidates could do well to steal a leaf out of the Bush play book as shown in Journeys With George, Alexandra Pelosi’s self-styled “home movie” featuring GW’s off-camera moments with the press in the 2000 campaign. At one point the Bush spin machine fretted that the movie was going to make their man look bad. They needn’t have worried.
Pelosi’s camcorder offered only one political revelation — how thoroughly Bush rolled the press with his awesome vaudeville show of disciplined spontaneity. He kids around. He flatters them with good ol’ boy nicknames. He bowls them over by bowling an orange down the plane’s aisle. He raises a trouser leg to demonstrate his Texan wardrobe: “Now these, these right here, are cowboy boots.” You feel you’re at ladies’ night and that Pelosi and Co have been so seduced there will be a ribald heckle from backstage, “Take ’em off!”
To appreciate the success of Bush’s charm offensive you have to see its effect as encapsulated in the archived bulletins of the 2000 campaign by the media sleuth Bob Somerby, whose website The Daily Howler deserves to be better known.
At the start of the season in June 1999, there were a lot of hairy-chested media proclamations about how tough their scrutiny was going to be. “The Great Bush Unveiling will take place under the withering gaze of some 200 reporters and photographers,” wrote the esteemed David Von Drehle of The Washington Post. A week later, here’s what Von Drehle’s withering gaze saw: “Looking relaxed and sounding eager, Texas Governor George W. Bush barnstormed across Iowa today with his heart on his sleeve, hoping to show that he can touch voters as effectively as he has tapped the chequebooks of the Republican elite.”
Fine, except that simultaneously the Gore campaign was being launched in the Post under the headline “The Big Sleepy” and profiled with a piece that began helpfully with a four-paragraph definition of the word “boring”. The Gore camp saw bias, but mostly it was sloth.
Deconstructing Gore’s animatronics was a less sweaty occupation than digging around in, say, old company minutes and Securities and Exchange Commission documents to pin down the facts about Bush’s mysteriously prescient sale of stock in his Harken oil company until the press had more time — ie, after Dubya was elected President. Journeys With George should make Gore want to slit his wrists.
“A president,” Newt Gingrich once told me, “has to be a compelling individual around whom people can organise their hopes. Charisma is not just projected. It’s conferred.” Charisma conferred was the reason dinosaur chic was so big this year, with Fritz Mondale, 74, and Frank Lautenberg, 78, recalled to life. We saw the hazards too. Lautenberg pulled off a win in New Jersey, but the stolid drone that earned Mondale the headline “Norwegian Wood” in 1984 when he ran against Reagan turned out to be even worse now the years have added an accusatory, grandfatherly ring.
Of all the Democratic retreads, how about bringing Gary Hart back for 2004? He is a less senescent 65. He is thoughtful as hell. He keeps cranking out his scary but prescient reports on national security; even before 9/11 Hart was warning of the risks of terrorists striking a skyscraper. After the Clinton years his ancient hanky panky with Donna Rice aboard Monkey Business seems almost quaint. At 65, it’s probably safe to assume that his hormones have calmed down. After all, Ted Kennedy’s have. Ted is 70 now and his enormous cereal-box head, barnacle jowls and stout frame have morphed him from reprobate kid brother to classic, old-time Irish politician. The years suit Hart too. He is much more credible now he’s going grey.
The devastated Democrats have to find a new star they can get behind fast. Despite the yawns of the press, Al Gore, well ahead of all other Democrats in the polls, is way behind Bush. If Gore doesn’t run, the best bet is probably Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, who was in town last week to ingratiate himself with big-money donors. He can dial up moral authority from his past as a Vietnam Vet who was also prominent in the anti-war movement and, more importantly, he has a face political cartoonists will love: long, plunging, ecclesiastical, with Lincolnesque lines and a shock of prime-time hair. Beside him, the other fresh contender, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, comes off as a GQ twinkie.
Frantic Democrats keep calling up the bona fide charisma of Bill Clinton. In the fag end of the campaign he made a late-night appearance with Hillary at a heaving downtown club, Lotus, to try to throw a last-minute life jacket to the drowning New York gubernatorial candidate, Carl McCall. The former president’s silver head swivelled like a Klieg light at the sardined young money crowd who were partying to the appropriate Clintonian anthem of rapper Nelly’s Hot in Herre.
They went berserk when Bill went into his familiar hound-dog political jam. “Lemme tell ya all somethin’ ’bout politics” (pause, roars, screams, yelps) “an’ how many points ah was behind at the same time right before ah won” (whistles, foot stomps, fainting fits).
Beside him, Hillary’s pants suits were pressed to kill. But not till 2008.
tina.brown@thetimes.co.uk
